


Messenger Birds

by Spamateur



Category: Dream SMP - Fandom, Minecraft (Video Game)
Genre: Afterlife, Crows, Deadbur - Freeform, Drabble, Mild Gore, Past Character Death, Philza but not directly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-04
Updated: 2021-03-04
Packaged: 2021-03-17 17:21:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 954
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29844876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Spamateur/pseuds/Spamateur
Summary: One by one, dead crows start toshow up in the afterlife.Sometimes they remind Wilbur too much of his life, from their jet-black wings to the way they intermittently speak in memories.But the seeds are there, and it's nice to have something to do in the afterlife that isn't ruminating on what he's done. That's why he died, isn't it? To escape what he did.So Wilbur feeds the birds.
Kudos: 2





	Messenger Birds

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: slight animal gore; it's sort of morbid.

Wilbur feeds the birds.

It starts with one. The logic to why it appeared is beyond Wilbur, but it knows his name. It caws it, warped and faded like an old recording, and the voice almost sounds painfully familiar.

He doesn't want to think about it. He keeps walking, shoving his hands in his coat pockets and they meet the sensation of something akin to coarse sand meet his fingers. He pulls away with a handful of it, and stares at the seeds in his palm.

The crow says his name. He looks at it.

He never had a thing for birds, before. But what else is he supposed to do? So he gives it the seeds and moves on.

Now, when he finds the flocks, black and bony and screeching in a cacophony of noise, and when he reaches into his pocket and finds little seeds that have no business being there, that must be infertile and stale and dead as anything else in this plane, he holds out his hand and spreads it across the floor for the crows to feast.

They remind him of someone. Especially when they speak. They usually sound like someone he knew but someone he doesn't need or want to think about in the afterlife.

Sometimes they parrot his own words back at him. Other times they speak words and phrases they shouldn’t know, no one should know, no one but Wilbur and Philza or Wilbur and Techno or Wilbur and Tommy and or, or, or. When it happens the first time, his hand pauses in its usual motion to throw out seeds. The crows, tripping over themselves with half-decayed talons, eagerly consume the dead seeds like it’s all they wanted to do in life. And when those seeds run out and Wilbur is still holding more, they eagerly consume him instead.

He doesn't die; he can't, so he just comes back. He watches them eye him expectantly, reaches into his pockets, and do what he always does, now. Wilbur feeds the birds.

Once, he hears one say those words, the last ones he heard another say before he died, and he doesn’t even think before he’s stepping down on the bird.

Survival instincts reside in a thing that’s already dead, so it stumbles away-- but not quickly enough with its bloody sockets and one stubbed foot to avoid Wilbur’s boot catching its wing, grinding it into the floor. Wilbur brings the other one down on its skull. It crunches and gives in like the big shell of a bleeding, screaming snail.

Wilbur feels sick. He drops the rest of the seeds on its corpse-not-corpse and the other crows eat it where the seeds fall into its skull, its ribcage, its now-warped eye sockets and half-there beak.

Wilbur doesn’t know if a dead thing can die again, but he never sees a bird with a crushed-in face when he returns. And he never hears those words again.

But still. Wilbur feeds the birds.

He sees Schlatt, sometimes. When Wilbur first saw him, he ran away. The next time he saw him, they fought. And the next. And the next.

Now they live, sometimes. Not properly living, but as close to it as Wilbur has felt in so long. Gambling and laughing and storytelling. It reminds him of the better days of his life.

One thing they don't do is talk. They don't talk about where they are. About what they left behind. About the tear in Wilbur's shirt, about Schlatt's sallow skin, about the fact that their hearts can't beat.

They don't need to. They know.

Death is not the escape Wilbur had hoped it would be, but he prefers it to life. He's a coward, he knows, he knows, he knows. In the moment, dying had felt like everything he needed. Now he knows it's everything he wanted. To run away. To not have to live with it, the horror, the despair, the consequences of his madness. Well, he's not living with it now, but it stays with him nonetheless, finer and stickier than the seeds in his pockets, except the birds can't peck it away.

They can try, though, in their own way. Wilbur can feed himself to them, let them eat away the forefront of his mind so he can get into the useless routine of feeding the dead, of spreading more seeds when they run out, of shoving down any fear and sorrow from his life and fading into a haze. The seeds only ever seem to run out when he's ready to go, and then when he's ready to return they're there again.

The seeds show up in his pocket when he feels an opening in the void, waiting for someone to fill it. He hums in acknowledgement when he realizes Tommy is about to die.

He starts walking away, and that's when the opening closes. He freezes. The seeds sifting through the holes n the fabric of his coat are irritating against his trembling fingers.

He can swear he feels his heart beating softly, quietly in his chest. The veil weakens.

It's an emotion that burns stronger than any other, his anger. Festers, ugly and dull, inside of his (still?) heart, waterlogs his frozen lungs, fills his sunken gaze and swells his shrunken veins. It feels alive, it feels like it's thrashing his ugly head and kicking its cloven feet inside of him. Wilbur lets its ugly head become his own and its cloven feet become the soles of his boots and he reaches between worlds-- not between, but past, _into_ , and he finds Tommy and Tubbo, alive.

Wilbur doesn't think he's going to be feeding the birds again anytime soon.

**Author's Note:**

> subject to editing hsggkghsk uh anyways make sure u drink water today


End file.
